Living in the (Lease) Matrix — Stop Letting Expirations Blindside Your Deals
Control the calendar, control the cash flow.
Every owner has a rent roll. We’ve found few with a good, intentional, lease matrix. One is accounting. The other is strategy.
A lease matrix is really a calendar, or a fancy lease expiration schedule — every lease, every expiration, spread across the year, with a few helpful strategic data points. But when you actually use it, it becomes a rhythm map for the entire asset. Whether it’s a 10-unit walk-up or a 200-unit mid-rise, this tool quietly keeps income steady, leasing and maintenance teams sane, leasing optimal, and lenders happy.
The real advantage? Timing.
In Washington, leasing is seasonal. Spring hums. Winter dies (up until ~Super Bowl). A lease matrix keeps you from stacking expirations in January when even the best leasing agents can’t sell sunlight that doesn’t exist. This can be even more important at smaller properties where accidentally lining up a handful of move outs in a slow season can be disastrous to debt service coverage and deplete reserves otherwise meant for more accretive projects.
Predictability = control.
Balanced expirations mean smoother cash flow. You can plan your turns, your CapEx, and your staffing instead of reacting to chaos. When you show up to a rent roll review and half the building expires in the same month — that’s not bad luck, that’s bad planning.
And if you really want to operate, not just own — track behavior.
Add a column for chronic DQs and late pays. It’s not about being punitive; it’s pattern recognition. Know who’s reliable, who’s repairable, and if you have a lot of potential exits in a coming month. You might look “in compliance” in a given month with only 8% expiring, but if half of those leases are to bad apples, you’re hoping to have move outs even earlier, creating some bottlenecking where the expiration data didn’t expect it.
Renewal timing isn’t just about rent — it’s about rules.
State law requires at least 90 days’ notice for rent increases, and Tacoma requires at least 120 days. The lease matrix makes sure you never miss that window — or that opportunity.
You can also use it to keep your best tenants.
Good operators don’t lose people; they reposition them. Shift renewals with six-, nine-, or ten-month terms (unless the loan says otherwise, some come with requirements of a maximum amount of units in what they define as short-term leases). Offer a small incentive to push great tenants into strong leasing months and to stay longer. We often offer a free month of utilities, an appliance replacement or upgrade (you can keep the old appliance for a replacement elsewhere or for parts) or a free carpet cleaning of their traffic areas. A little flexibility beats turnover cost and a 30-day vacancy every time.
Building one?
Excel is fine. Write it out on paper for all I care (if the property is small enough and you want to go analog). We got slightly-more-fancy and built one in Google Sheets that auto-populates tables and charts and presents things nicely for the team. I thought there might be some software out there that did this, but haven’t really found it the way I want it in the market. We’ve got a plug-and-play template we can share with clients. It takes ~15 to 30 minutes to set up if you have someone that could use a new vantage point on their property.
Bottom line:
This isn’t complicated — it’s discipline. A lease matrix turns ownership into stewardship. It’s how you turn a rent roll from a spreadsheet into a strategy.
